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FREDERICK CREWS
philosophical conclusions but to a physical and nervous collapse.
Conrad's Congo interlude presents exactly the interpretive problem
for
his
biographers that "Heart of Darkness" does for his critics; in
both cases he went out of his way to make a real journey coincide
with an unconscious investigation of his morbidity.
It
could be shown
that "Heart of Darkness" is packed with family allusions so private
that no concept of "conscious art" could make use of them. In
various ways Kurtz amounts to a vindictive reconstruction of Conrad's
father,6 and the story alludes not only to the Congo voyage but also
to the childhood period of exile in Russia after Conrad's mother, like
Kurtz's Intended, had retired to a "sepulchral city" with "an ashy
halo," leaving Conrad to cope with a father who inspired what
Jocelyn Baines calls "admiration and contemptuous pity." Then Con–
rad like Marlow must have "resented bitterly the absurd danger of
our situation, as if to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom
had been a dishonouring necessity."7 Whether or not this cryptic
6. Both Kurtz and Korzeniowski - the names are alike - are intellectuals
and versifiers; neither can be properly said to have a profession; both have
dabbled in journalism and written pamphlets; both have messianic political
ambitions and a mixture of refinement and demagoguery; both are
accused of disrupting the orderly domination of a victimized territory;
both die far from home, maintaining almost until the end a grandiloquent
intention to return and prevail; both are remembered as prematurely
withered and helpless, yet oppressive; both are famous for their arresting
voices and their ability to persuade; both seem addicted to self-pity; both
refuse an offer of rescue; both leave literary remains; both profess a high–
minded Christianity but have experimented with dissipation. The family
of Kurtz's "Intended" objects to her engagement to him ; so did Evelina
Bobrowska's family object to her engagement to Apollo Korzeniowski. These
parallels, all of which can be inferred by checking "Heart of Darkness"
against Jocelyn Baines's biography of Conrad, receive further credence
from Bernard Meyer's conclusion that "there was something of his father
in every story [Conrad] had written."
7. Of these allusions to childhood dependency one deserves special interest,
not only because it has been a crux but because it epitomizes the privacy
and anguished sincerity of the story's autobiographical reference. Marlow
finds Kurtz attended by a remarkably boyish Russian, a "harlequin" with a
peeling nose, who sits at Kurtz's feet and tries to think the best of him, as
the well-bred, inwardly unforgiving Conrad must have done with his father
in Russia. This figure of submission had formerly been rebellious against
his father, an arch-priest; he "had run away from school, had gone to sea in
a Russian ship; ran away again; served some time in English ships; was
now reconciled with the arch-priest. He made a point of that." Beyond
